


thought snatcher

by fishybowl



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bullying, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Hand Jobs, M/M, all other relationships are brief, shikatema-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 22:09:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19981312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishybowl/pseuds/fishybowl
Summary: Shikamaru meets Temari and dooms himself to four years of pining on the same day.





	thought snatcher

**Author's Note:**

> i'm actually pretty happy with the way this came out!! i love shikatema with all my heart and i've been wanting to write something about it but i could never get the motivation to do it  
> i planned for this to be longer, but i decided that i'm just gonna write another fic thats mostly sand siblings centric to get all my other thoughts out of the way.  
> enjoy and thank you for reading and please tell me in the comments if i made any grammar mistakes. <3

Shikamaru meets Temari in the ninth grade, and it only takes one wink and one snarky comment to the teacher from her for him to realize that he’s completely and utterly fucked.

“So, where did you come here from?” she asks, leaning against the doorway to the cafeteria. He would have to be an idiot to not realize that she’s purposefully blocking him from getting in. “Or have you lived here forever?”

He swallows down the lump in his throat and suppresses the urge to lie to her. She’s dangerous. That was obvious from the first time he laid eyes on her. Still, he feels like he should be truthful to her, especially if she’s new. “Lived here all my life,” he mutters.

“Interesting. I just moved here from the Sand Village. Up east,” she says, as if he’s stupid enough to not know where the Sand Village is. Everyone knows where the Sand Village is; you can’t go for one day without seeing it on the news, the victim of some attack or another. He wonders if that’s why she moved.

“Nice,” he says, mentally slapping himself. He’s smarter than this. His words shouldn’t get all jumbled and stupid just because he’s faced with the presence of an attractive girl. He isn’t twelve anymore.

“If you’re dumb enough to believe that, then yeah,” she cocks an eyebrow at him. “Well, that’s all I wanted to know. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch me later.” She winks again, and his heart does a flip in his chest before missing the landing and sinking down to his feet.

“Bye,” he croaks, eyes following her as she sashays through the cafeteria and takes a seat at a table with a few kids already occupying half the seats. Everyone else at the table immediately stands up and goes to find another place to sit as soon as she takes her seat, but she doesn’t seem bothered. He almost considers going to sit by her, but he’s spared from the mortification when two other boys, the ones she walked in with, take their spots next to her.

With that sight glued into his mind, he pries open the window of his history classroom and skips the rest of the day, electing instead to stay at home and smoke on the couch before his parents get home. Not even the smell of ash on the leather gets her out of his head.

…

He successfully ignores Temari for the rest of freshman year, barring a couple thrown greetings from across the hallway, but he isn’t so lucky when she manages to wriggle into the last spot in his first period class as the next year starts. She plops down in the seat right next to him, and he mentally curses whatever gods are out there.

“So, Nara,” she begins, and he shakes his head, sighing. “Do you know what other classes we have together?”

“No,” he says, turning his head to the blackboard and watching the door, longing for more kids to pile in and for class to start.

“Well, I have some good news for you!” she pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from her backpack and shoves it in front of his nose. He squints and takes the schedule, eyes skimming over her classes. Fuck. She’s in every class of his, minus Biology.

“Would you call that good news?” he says grumpily, folding her schedule and handing it back to her.

“Absolutely. You have the privilege of walking me to every class, now!” she replies cheerily, and he has to force the corners of his mouth to stay downturned.

“I’m more inclined to call it a punishment.”

She laughs again, not seeming bothered at all by his lack of enthusiasm. He notes the sound of her laugh, against his own will. It starts out as something akin to a chuckle, but it ends up as a cackle that has half the class turning to look at her. Including the teacher.

Mr. Hatake doesn’t even look at them when he gives both of them an hour of detention. Great. The worst part is that she doesn’t appear to be upset. If anything, she looks pleased as punch that he’s being forced to stay after school. Shikamaru briefly wonders if she’s a psychopath.

…

_No, he realizes,_ when the gym teacher finally gets his shit together and cuts his motivational speech down short enough to allow half an hour of dodgeball during class. _It’s her brother who’s the psychopath._

Gaara is mean from the tips of his stringy ginger hair to the bottom of his black-painted toenails, and he clings to Temari like she’s the only thing keeping him grounded. She ruffles his hair, occasionally, and he glares at anyone who looks at her the wrong way. By the time the dodgeball game starts, everyone’s so riled up by his looks that nobody really wants to play anymore.

Shikamaru didn’t want to play in the first place.

Fortunately for everyone on planet earth, Gaara isn’t physically strong enough to pose too much of a threat to the class’s wellbeing. Temari, however, is, and so is her other brother. Temari and Kankurou are the definition of a team; they hurl dodgeballs at everyone on Shikamaru’s team until he and one other kid on his team are left standing.

(The boy later introduces himself as Lee, and he’s got a killer throw.)

Shikamaru’s teammate makes a terribly stupid, and very brave decision, and nails Gaara right in the stomach with a dodgeball. Everyone sees the moment when the air rushes out of Gaara’s lungs and he falls on his ass with a thump. Kankurou punishes Lee with a dodgeball to the face. 

“Is that even legal?” a girl with long blonde hair asks her friend. “In dodgeball, I mean.”

This is your chance. Grab the ball. Don’t embarrass yourself, he thinks, and he’s sprinting over to the ball used to maim Lee before Kankurou has a chance to think. He pulls his arm back and throws the ball at the other boy, and he can just see his eyes widening before the ball hits him in the ankle, just before it hits the ground and negates the throw altogether. The gym teacher blows his whistle, and it’s just down to Shikamaru and the bane of his existence.

“You threw the last ball over here, you know,” she says, a smile on her face. It’s not a mean one, and the words she says aren’t mean to be unkind. There he goes again, with the pink starting to spread across his forehead. He needs to get out of here before his teenage hormones decide to make a terrible choice. 

“Just hit me with the ball, Tem,” he says. She blinks a couple times at the nickname, and he doesn’t realize that it’s slipped out until she’s blushing, too.

“Right, then,” she clears her throat, as if she’s just realizing that they’re not the only people in the room. The ball hits his chest with a light thump, and he realizes with a sense of irrational happiness that she could have thrown it much harder. Mr. Gai blows his whistle a final time, and the game is over. He isn’t upset that he lost, even though the rest of his team is. Naruto, a boy who he met over the summer, sighs and hip checks him.

“I get it, bro,” he says, and Shikamaru cuts him off before he can continue.

“Don’t call me bro.”

“I get it, dude,” he continues, ignoring the way Shikamaru presses his palm to his forehead. “You had to get out of there before she noticed the way you popped a boner halfway through.”

“What? No, I didn’t-“ he protests, and Naruto jerks his head downwards. “Go fuck yourself,” he tells Naruto, who laughs and punches him in the arm. Shikamaru rubs the forming bruise.

“Nah, man, I think that’s your job now. Get out of here; we only have a few minutes between classes.”

Shikamaru is unwilling to give Temari an excuse to bug him about being late, so he spends the rest of the day suffering with his jacket on his lap.

…

The trashy TV shows that would occasionally come on always portrayed high school as being an absolute shitshow, but Shikamaru didn’t start thinking that was true until a fateful day in eleventh grade. The brick wall behind him scratches against the skin on his back, as he kicks and tries to get his assaulter off of him.

“Nara,” the boy rumbles. “I know you have money with you. Hand it over and nobody gets hurt.” His voice is smooth, and Shikamaru feels a wave of despair rise in his chest as he frantically sends the toe of his shoe flying into the other boy’s knee.

He swears but doesn’t drop Shikamaru. “Nara, this is your last chance,” he warns, and Shikamaru feels tempted to just hand it over. But that would go against literally every principle he’s been taught, so he instead spits in the guy’s face and flails his arms, shouting pathetically. It’s embarrassing, and he’ll regret such a show of weakness later, but it does work, because he soon hears another voice as someone’s running to get him.

“Get away!” the voice shrieks, and he recognizes it immediately. Temari? He blinks his eyes open to see her in all her absolutely terrifying glory. Her hair is snarled and not tied up into the normal four ponytails she usually creates, and she’s holding something that shimmers in the light in her hand.

Temari lifts the knife defiantly and points it at Shikamaru’s assaulter’s throat. She’s over a foot shorter than the twelfth grader, but she does have something he doesn’t, and that’s a lethal weapon.

“I’ll stab the shit out of you,” she says, and she waves the knife. The way she holds it makes it look like she’s had practice, and Shikamaru shudders, but it’s not out of fear. “Let him go,” she enunciates, sounding like she’s talking to a misbehaving dog.

The guy seems to think, but he soon decides that he’d rather book it out of there than be on the nasty end of Temari’s blade. He drops Shikamaru, who slumps against the wall, and runs.

“Fuck,” he rasps tiredly. He looks up at her, and she’s holding her hand out for him to take it. He grips her hand and lets her haul him to his feet. “Thanks-“ he begins, but he’s cut off when she slaps him. “Hey!”

“Idiot!” she hisses, her hands clamping tightly around his shoulders. “You are a complete moron, Shikamaru. You have the top grades in the entire school and here you are, being stupid.” With that, she grabs him around the waist and pulls him into a hug. His fingers stray into her blonde locks, and he pulls aimlessly at one of the tangles near her scalp.

“You should go home,” she eventually says, breaking the silence that’s slowly verging onto awkward. “You shouldn’t stay here after you got attacked.” It’s a completely sensible thing that she’s saying – Temari is a sensible girl – but it still makes heat flutter up in his stomach. 

The words come out of his mouth before he can stop them. “Come with me,” he requests, and she stares at him for a long moment while he speaks.

“Nara,” _She’s back to using his last name, that can’t be good_ \- We both know what’s going to happen if I skip school and go to your house.” She sighs, rubbing at her face. “Just head home and take a nap or something. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Temari starts to turn away, but she pauses halfway through her step and swivels back around on her heel, leaning forward and planting a kiss on his cheek. His face glows a rosy pink, and she smiles. “Catch you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he croaks. “Bye.”

He doesn’t think of much else that night.

...

It’s a fast and easy friendship from that point forward. Neither of them mentions the almost kiss, the almost fling, but they both settle into a comfortable routine that mainly involves walking with one another to classes and bugging the teacher until they get the assigned seats that they want.

The summer passes quickly, and Shikamaru feels a terrible sense of regret as he walks into his first day of his last year of high school. He’s texted Temari about her schedule, and they only share two classes – gym, and political science. Temari wastes no time barreling into him as soon as she bursts through the front doors of the school, and he wraps his arms around her waist and hides his smile in her shoulder. He waves to Gaara and Kankurou, who stand a few yards behind them, and Gaara lifts his hand in a tiny wave. 

Political science is third period, and Gym is right before lunch, in another stroke of bad luck. He’s just so excited to have the pleasure of sweating his balls off while digging into a disgusting hamburger that may or may not be made out of ham.

Two weeks pass before Shikamaru gives up on his friendship façade. He wants Temari to be his friend, sure; she’s been an amazing friend for the past half-year; but he also wants more. He stays friends with Temari, and nothing changes on the surface, but his body takes his acceptance of this fact as a cue that they’re dating now. Which, unfortunately, they’re not.

…

High school hits another rocky patch once Temari gets caught up in another bout of drama. Ino, a girl who he made friends with over the summer, is blabbing about it while they walk to homeroom, stopping only occasionally at the nearest water fountain to allow herself to keep talking.

“I can’t believe they’re fucking,” she says, appearing to be in awe.

Shikamaru stops studying on the go and looks up at her, eyebrows knitting together. “Who? Not me and anyone, right?” Surely, he couldn’t have been that obvious, right? And Temari would absolutely murder him if anything like that got out, even if she had no idea-

“I wouldn’t have said ‘they’ if you were one of them, stupid,” she grins, and Shikamaru’s organs stop tying together to form an intricate bow. She takes a ponytail out of the abyss of her purse and grips it between her teeth, grabbing her hair in one hand and failing miserably at continuing to talk. 

Shikamaru takes the ponytail from her and helps put her hair up, and he’s rewarded with a blinding smile. Ino may not be a Temari kind of friend, but she’s definitely a friend.

“I’m talking about Lee and Gaara!” she bursts out, after keeping Shikamaru in waiting for far too long. He almost drops the ponytail out of surprise, and flails to grab it and wrap it around her hair once more, tightening the ponytail.

“Wait, what? I didn’t know that they were even friends!” He fails to keep the shock out of his voice.

“Tell that to Naruto. Poor guy caught them in the locker rooms,” she sighs. “Sucks for them, but at least none of the teachers got an eyeful. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with stuff like that.”

Anyone who has feelings for anyone would be jealous of Ino’s relationship with her girlfriend, Sakura. The two of them spend their free times having picnics, drinking coffee, and probably burning down the houses of high school boys. “Anyway, enough of them. What about you, Shika? Have you got it bad for anyone?”

He starts to sweat, and he’s sure that what he feels for Temari is reflected in every aspect of his face. “No,” he lies through his teeth, and Ino sighs.

“You’re so boring!” 

“Sure am.” He says. He takes his phone out of his pocket and types out a quick text to Temari. 

_S: Is it true?_

She writes back immediately.

_T: God, don’t make me think about it. I’ve been texted that question enough times today._

_S: That’s fair._

_T: Also, I won’t be at school today, and I might have to skip tomorrow too. Gaara’s freaking out, and I don’t want to risk him trashing the house or anything while I’m out. Kank’s still gonna be at school, though, and please do me a favor by asking him literally every question about the subject you can._

_S: On it. I’ll text you later. <3_

He barely realizes what he’s typing until he’s pressed 3 on his keyboard and hit ‘send’. She doesn’t respond for five minutes, and he briefly considers deleting the message to cover his tracks. It’d haunt him for the rest of his days, but she might not have seen it yet.  
He picks up his vibrating phone during homeroom at the risk of facing the wrath of his teacher to see the responding text, anxiety swimming through his head.

_T: <3_  
…  
It’s another three weeks before someone makes a move, and surprisingly, it’s not Shikamaru. Gym class is just as bad, if not worse than the previous couple years of it, but things are just going in a downward spiral as Temari finishes growing, fitting into her body and turning out to be drop-dead gorgeous. 

This is bad for a multitude of reasons. One; now, he’s in danger of someone else seeing Temari for who she really is and deciding to take Shikamaru’s place as Pining Best Friend; and two, the uniforms in Gym do nothing to mask what she’s hiding under her shirt. She jogs next to him during the daily half mile run, and the heat outside isn’t the only reason he’s panting.

Her shirt rides up her hips, and he sends the bird to anyone who turns to look. The run ends and sweat is leaking down Temari’s neck. She leans down, hands on her knees, breathing slightly unsteadily. Shikamaru is in much worse shape, as he prefers not to exercise basically ever, but he can’t focus on his own issues when she’s right there.

He takes a seat with the rest of the students and wriggles until his shirt is hiding the semi that he’s rocking from that stupid run. She’s not even one of those people who suddenly becomes the hottest thing alive when they’re exercising; afterwards, she just looks normal and sweaty, but Shikamaru still can’t take his eyes off of her. _Is he really the only one who’s seeing this? Really? Are they all blind?_

Temari turns to him and gives him a sly smile, and he feels a surge of panic. _Does she know?_ She stretches her arms up and yawns, and scoots slightly closer. His ability to deny his feelings is dwindling by the second.

Fortunately, she can’t get much further than that. Class ends after a game of volleyball, during which Shikamaru gets smacked in the head by the ball six times in total. At this point, he swears that he’s being aimed at. For once, he’s thankful that lunch is next period. If he rushes, he has a solid half hour to get home, eat something other than cafeteria food, jack off, and be in Biology before anyone notices that he’s gone. None of the staff blink as he slips out through the front door; as a soon to be grad0uate, he’s allowed to leave as long as he shows up back on time.

It starts getting uncomfortable to walk when Shikamaru’s halfway home, and he has a terrifyingly Naruto-like thought: _fuck it._

He takes a detour and walks into the forest. He still has a half mile to go before he can get home, and he’s really starting to feel the pain, especially when Temari keeps flashing into his head every couple seconds. He sits down next to a tree, pressing a hand over his heart to slow his breathing. 

Okay. Here we go. He can get this over fast, and he might still have time to hit a McDonalds on his way to school. Maybe he’ll pick something up for Temari. _Yeah, Shikamaru, that’s really romantic – jacking off in the forest and then giving shitty fast food to the girl you thought about._

He unbuttons his jeans and slides them down past his knees. The air rushes out of his lungs in one exhale as his boxers follow his jeans down his legs. It takes just a few touches, his fingertips on his dick, before he’s at full hardness. He leans his head back against the tree, ignoring the scratching of bark on his scalp and the pressure on his ponytail, and lets his imagination get the better of him.

“Shikamaru,” brain-Temari whispers, and he groans, hand working faster in a frantic attempt to speed things up. “Temari,” he mutters, rolling her name around on his tongue. 

“Shikamaru,” the voice says again, but this time, it’s clearer. He knows what’s about to happen before he opens his eyes and stares face to face with Temari, who looks like she’s frantically trying to stifle a laugh. “I’m pretty sure you could get charged for public indecency with that.”

“This isn’t funny!” he says, indignantly, but her laughter is contagious. “Also, on a completely unrelated note, how much did you hear?”

“Pretty much all of it,” she admits, biting her tongue, and okay, maybe it is a little funny.

“Fuck you,” he says, and her voice sends another bolt of lightning to his dick. 

“Hah, you wish, don’t you?” she asks, sitting down next to him. Her eyes stray over to his hand, still wrapped around himself. She gently takes a hold of his wrist and pushes it away, replacing his hand with her own. It’s calloused, and Shikamaru inhales a sharp breath.

“We’re really doing this,” he says, and it’s more of a statement than a question. Temari nods, scooting closer to him. 

“Just tell me if I’m doing something wrong, alright?” 

Shikamaru nods quickly, a silent encouragement. He reaches for her free hand and takes it, curling his fingers around hers. “Alright,” he breathes. “You can start now. Or, whenev-“

His thought is cut off by the slight tightening of fingers around his dick, and the way her manicured nails scrape lightly against the sensitive skin. He brings his hand up to his mouth and bites down on his fingers, making a valiant attempt to stop the whines from escaping his lips. Shikamaru’s hips stutter up into Temari’s hand, and she tsks, pulling away.

Removing her hand from Shikamaru’s own, she presses it down on his hip, effectively pinning him to the grass. “Stop that,” she scolds, sliding the hand on his shaft slowly up to rub her thumb against the head. He makes a wheezy noise, and she’s so beautiful, and _how did he get so lucky?_

That’s his last thought for a while, as she works her hand slowly, teasingly, until she finally pushes him over the edge and he comes, shaking. She licks her hand – hot – and wipes the rest of his remains on the previously unsoiled grass. “You should head home. I’ll grab some food and meet you there, alright?”

He hums sleepily. “Alright. Yeah. You’re my girlfriend now, right? I think that’s what that meant?”

Temari looks at him fondly. “Yes.” She waves her hand and helps him to his feet. “Shoo. I’ll be there in half an hour with some McDonalds.” She kisses him, as chaste as a kiss can get, and walks off in the other direction.

Shikamaru thinks that he’s in love.

**Author's Note:**

> im sorry for slandering you in this mcdonalds   
> you're still my favorite place to go to stress eat and cry


End file.
